wild horses run through your hollow bones
by puertoricanjane
Summary: The world is just so big and she is just so small. (Sue, after.)


Her arm is starting to cramp but Sue can't stop waving and smiling, not with Justin and Feena so close yet so far away. Then they're gone and she is left with the ache in her eyes and cheeks and Parm waking up to greet the new day around her. She drops her arm awkwardly and squeezes her eyes against new tears, fisting a hand over her heart like that will somehow keep it safe. Breathe, she thinks. Sue breathes. The smell of fish and smoke. The familiar weight of Puffy on her head and shoulders. He noses behind her ear and she giggles, watery.

"Right," Sue says, opening her eyes. She dries her face with one of her long sleeves and gives a wobbly smile. "Adventure waits for no one, huh, Puffy? And neither does Aunt Lilly's cooking!"

"Puff-puff!" Puffy says.

Fishermen amble by on their way to the docks. Some do a double take at her; one patron of Aunt Lilly's tips his cap and gives her a wink. Others greet her as if she never left and Sue accepts it graciously, like a lady, and pretends the only paths she's tread are those winding through Parm, that the soles of her feet have only ever known wood and dirt and sun warmed cobblestone. She doesn't say to them: But I've come so far. Can't you tell?

She wants to say: I've scaled the unscalable.

She wants to say: I've seen the sun rise on the End of the World.

.

"If it isn't the stowaway herself," Aunt Lilly says, turning from the pot on the stove at the sound of the hatch opening. She always looks pretty but there's something about Lilly with her hip cocked and frying pan in hand, face sweaty but luminescent, flyaways gently framing her cheeks. "I thought you were grounded for at least fifteen years."

Sue stands in the cramped kitchen she's been in a thousand times before and feels nostalgic but also not quite right. Wrong footed. It's a feeling she hasn't been able to shake since she came back and she wonders if she ever will lose it, this perpetual sense that she is out of step with everyone and everything. She smiles awkwardly and prays it doesn't show, smoothing down the front of her dress for lack of anything better to do with her hands. Without her bow and mace they just feel strangely empty. "I bargained it down to ten."

A kettle whistles. Lilly—a professional multi-tasker—doesn't miss a beat, leaving Sue to stare at her back. Steam wafts. The scent of ginger fills her nostrils. There's the sound of pouring.

"Hey, look at it this way: At least you won't be an old maid before your next adventure."

Aunt Lilly says it casually, like it's a sure thing, the kind of magic speak that drew Sue to Justin even when she wanted to draw away from everyone else, and Sue's thrown wildly, like she's back on top of a wall peering over the edge of the known world.

Heart in her throat.

Sue swallows it back down.

"That's the plan," she lies and squeezes in next to Aunt Lilly to start cutting up vegetables for the morning stew special. Lilly flashes her a grateful grin.

It's its own sort of dance, not altogether different from battle. Sue dices and Lilly bustles and Puffy dozes in a slant of light outside the kitchen. He knows the rules better than Justin ever did. Sue knows too and the sun is soft on her neck, no Puffy or hair to mask it.

Lilly never asks. Maybe that's why it's easy for Sue to tell. She talks then, not about the bad or scary parts, but their time as apprentice sailors, how they got up every morning at the crack of dawn to swab the deck, Sue falling asleep against her mop and jerking back awake to find barely any progress made.

Lilly laughs and it's Justin's laugh in his mother's mouth, loud and unashamed. "He wouldn't last a day on my crew," she says, shaking her head, and Sue privately agrees. Lilly's face turns soft. Thoughtful. Her lips gently curve and Sue recognizes the expression, faintly, from a time long past. "But you know...adventure is in his blood." She looks at Sue, eyes bright, still smiling that mother's smile. "It's in yours now too."

There are legacies under Justin's skin, the sky in his eyes and the sea in his lungs. All Sue has is herself and she's already faltered, failed. Her eyes burn at the unfairness of it. The world is just so big and she is just so _small_.

"You really think…?"

But here's the thing about Sue: she has always wanted to believe. In Angelou, in Liete, in Justin.

Always, always Justin.

"I don't think," says Lilly, pirate turned restaurant owner, wife turned widow, mother to silly little boys and wayward little girls. A woman who has reinvented herself time and time again. "I know."

.

On the second floor of the Seagull Restaurant is a wall of adventurers frozen in time. Sue stands in front of Justin's picture, trailing her eyes over his flamboyant figure, and smiles, shaking her head. She wipes the dust off his rounded cheek, pretending it is grime. Pretending is all she has now.

"You silly boy," Sue says, fondly. "I bet you don't miss me half as much as I miss you. Parm isn't the same without you, you know. But I know we'll be together again. All three of us. Just don't make me wait forever, okay?"

It hurts. Endings always do. But Sue knows what it's like to lose everything and this isn't it. Not when somewhere beyond the End of the World, beyond mountains and deserts and ruins and seas, a girl like a sister and a boy who is friend, brother, and son explore places so far off they can't be marked on any map in Aunt Lilly's vast collection.

Once a boy extended a hand when she needed it most and lifted her out of despair. Sue won't ever, ever forget or stop dreaming of walking again by his side.


End file.
